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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6011940" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok.  Generally if lots of people agree on some point, and it baffles you its because the people are coming at the problem from a completely different direction.  No, the monsters are still there.  And, you can still use them.  However, the effective CR of about a quarter of the monsters in the monster manual changes fairly drastically.  You can't be quite as lazy with encounter design and rewards if the party is specialized as you can when its a more typical presumed generalist party.  That being said, the CR/EL system is grossly and wildly inaccurate on many levels, so if you aren't applying your own judgment to it already you probably should be.  So, to a certain extent I concede that you make the XP system more difficult, but if you've ever tried to do anything original in encounter design you've probably ran up hard against the problems in the CR/EL/XP system already.  It basically sucks as anything but rough guidelines.What do you mean by 'creative'?  You seem to be using it in a sense that is almost the opposite of my understanding about what 'creative' means.  For a balanced, generalist party, with all of the expected tools, most problems encountered will be addressed or at least addressable in the normal, expected, presumed manner.  You even address this yourself in your other points when you say things like "dealing large masses of opponents is difficult without a mid-level wizard".   Most of your complaints about a unbalanced party seem to be, "Well, the party won't be able to use the typical uncreative solution to problems.  What then?"  The answer is, if they find themselves facing those problems, they better be creative.But this can happen in any party.  In fact, its funny that you mention rogues as being outshone, because generally speaking being outshown by others is the expected life of a rogue.  You start out being fairly useful, but by 5th level or so it's really easy to be outshown - especially in 1st or 2nd edition D&D.  First, you increasingly aren't as capable as a fighter over time, and second your utility skills are generally unreliable and greatly outclassed by easily accessible and more reliable spells like Mage Hand, Unseen Servant, Silence, Invisibility, Jump, Levitate, Fly, Knock, Find Traps, Detect Magic, Clairaudience/Clairvoyance, Augury, Arcane Eye, etc.  It takes work to not get outshown as a thief or rogue, and so competing only against other rogues is perhaps preferable.I think there is a deeper issue underlying your complaint, and that is the issue of how you as a DM must change the way you prepare based on choices that your party has made.  I think the fundamental problem is that you are assuming that the social contract at the table is, "The DM presents the players with challenges of his own devising.  The players try to overcome those challenges as best as they are able."  By creating less than optimized characters or a less than optimized party, you are claiming that they are violating the implied social contract to overcome your challenges "as best as they are able", and you are asking for validation from the boards that you can now discipline your players for this gross violation of proper player conduct.Since you aren't recieving the validation you expected, you are baffled.</blockquote>

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